Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Hate is the Plague Embraced by our Enemies

“Postmodernism has
taught us that we live in an age of irony…where an undiscriminating skepticism
brushes matters such as morality and political ethics aside as so much
anachronistic detritus.”(Humanity, an
emotional history. Stuart Walton)

My children
attended a school that had a significant Muslim population.My children’s friends were of many faiths and
ethnically diverse backgrounds. So I was concerned that there were times they
felt under threat because of what they were not, as opposed to what they
were.The good Muslims would tell my
children and their friends that they would protect them (from the bad
Muslims).Of course I was
outraged.We live in the UK and at least
in theory, we are all equal, which means we are also educated towards
equality.This means we should all receive
equal treatment from the moment of our birth and throughout our lives. I do not
mean that we should all receive a private education, private health care and a
free luxury car but there are certain inalienable rights which are consistent
across all sections of society. Those rights should only be constrained when
our actions prevent others from enjoying those same equal rights.

But I could rant
and rave as much as I wanted to about how no-one is equal if they feel the need
for protection, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the end result, which
is that their generation, growing up in an environment of selective tolerance,
has little if any faith in the established order, in authority, in
government.This is perhaps the greatest
crime for which our politicians should be condemned.

So physical
bullying and threats occurred and were ignored.Teachers’ mouthed hollow phrases like “zero tolerance” while looking
away.It is easier to act against cyber-bullying than it is, to impose a sanction on the right kind of bigot.

If truth is
subjective, it follows that it is also subject to partisan policies.Therefore, the application of justice can be
conditioned on circumstance and is consequently often, no more than an act of self-congratulatory
illusion.

Resenting anything
is a passive emotional response.Hate is
not a passive emotion.It cannot
surprise us that the activist hates any feeling of powerlessness and strikes
out against whatever is responsible for that feeling even when the emotion is the
product of a manufactured, systemic prejudice.

There has always
existed a selective freedom of speech which allowed for discrimination to be
applied.This is one of the human species
most unattractive character traits.We
are a herd that cleaves to the collective as if our lives depended on it. In
past eras it did. But in the late 20th and early 21st
century our education system was supposed to have delivered a population able
to think and act for itself and not as an unthinking mass in the thrall of the
latest singer, actor, sportsman (or woman), aristocrat or orator. But this is
the era of celebrity and perhaps because so much is asked of us and the choices
are so diverse we are unwilling to commit to a position that is outside of a
consensus that has been decided for us and with little credible discussion.

It follows on from
the previous paragraph that demagogues have played an essential role in human
history.They have manipulated emotions,
prejudices and passions and rarely if ever for altruistic reasons.Power, domination and exclusion of anything
or anyone that is contrary to ones own position is a primitive response to any
challenge.But it is also a very
effective means of establishing dominance and control.That elemental behavior is the reason that Israel is
having such a hard time internationally.People who are committed to a cause will usually, aggressively push that
cause. Jews are neither used to reacting to aggression by returning it nor are
they accustomed to behaving badly in response, but it is often the only way to
react to aggression because it is the normal way that we establish reasonable rules
of conduct.Only an enemy that respects
its opponent behaves with care.

But here’s the
thing. In British universities, where Jews and their supporters are frequently
assaulted under the assumption that they are “Zionists” (and if they are not,
oh well!) the most senior court in the land, the High Court of Justice ruled
that a perception of fear or a perception of intimidation was not a legally
admissible behavior that could be used to define prejudice against the entire
Jewish student community.If members of
the radical Left or Islamic faith experienced an atmosphere of fear and
intimidation, a way would have been found to criminalize the perpetrators and
rid the universities of the perpetrators influence.It does say much about inequality within the
British ‘justice’ system.

Selective equality
infuses much of British and Western society today. One more example will
suffice to demonstrate the art of that selective equality and the parallel
incitement that accompanies it.Within
the last few days it was revealed that Britain’s main teachers union, the
National Union of Teachers (NUT) had cooperated with an educational charity for
children (‘Edukid’) to produce an antisemitic educational resource which was to
be rolled out across the country and whose purpose it was to profile
Palestinian suffering.Apart from its
omission of any historical context, the reason I refer to this document as
antisemitic is that it does not refer to Israelis as Israelis but as Jews. Of
course Muslims – Arabs are referred to as Palestinian. So Britain’s main teachers union adopts a Nazi
tactic of propagating a prejudiced narrative against Israel
which leads all British children taught by the NUT to erase any differentiation
between Israeli's
and Jews anywhere else in the world.

This resource was
to be rolled out to all children, from three years of age.

This is only
possible if the process is racist from its inception. As obscene
was NUT's pernicious defense that it works with the Holocaust Educational Trust to produce
materials for schools.So learning about
dead Jews is OK (as long as some Muslim teachers do not have to present the
material to their classes).

Maliciously, the
NUT provides an illegitimately analogous equivalence between the Shoah and the
Arab-Israeli Conflict.

A conspiracy by a
national British trade union (the NUT) and a British educational charity
(Edukid) to role out an Arab (Palestinian) libel against Judaism and the Jewish
state should result in both organizations losing their charitable status and
both being heavily fined. Extinction is what both organizations deserve.Individual initiators of this antisemitic
conspiracy should be given a life time ban from receiving public funding.In fact the only likely consequence will be
enhanced credibility amongst Fascism's proudest supporters.

Of greater evil,
the Israel-Arab conflict has its roots in Muslim attempts to deny its minorities, self-determination.Fundamentalist Islam believes that any area
once conquered or achieving Muslim majority becomes part of a holy Arab
(Muslim) endowment which must never be relinquished to the infidel. It explains
the intransigence of Iran
and it explains the outpourings of HAMAS.It is a war that is religiously dictated by Islamic injunction which
will see Islam’s glorious fighters joyfully murder, down to the last baby,
every Jew in the Holy land; another injunction
from what we are so often told is the “Religion of Peace.”

The difference
between the Hard Left, many sharing the Islamic faith and the extreme right is
that the latter admit their prejudice while neither the Hard Left nor Islam
have ever had to come to terms with the hatred and the bigotry that is the
original sin of their birth and which crucially, continues to drive so many of
them.

This is the war
being increasingly fought throughout the Western world against Israel
and against its supporters.If there is any
question of why so many Jews feel that conditions today are increasingly
similar to what they were in 1923 (when Hitler and his ilk began their ascent
to power) we have the NUT and Edukit to inadvertently remind us.